Up At Six

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Up At Six Aviaries, owned by Damian and Kirsten Bates, started in 1983.

Web site began in 1992 on Engineering Internationals Unix based ISP network aka RT66 Internet. The original URL was www.rt66.com/upatsix/. It was created initially as a place where people could share the knowledge gathered from the #parrots [1] and #PetBirds IRC channels as well as to download a horrible little program Damian had written called "Bird Basics". =)

Up At Six created their own web server & network on August 9th, 1995 which consisted of one old PC running Slackware Linux [2] that Damian named bofh.mysite.org [3]. (The BOFH hostname coming from Simon Travaglia [4] of New Zealands BOFH Stories). The name had two reason, one due to the admiration Damian had for Simon's stories and the second being the machine was pieced together from many old dilapidated machines. A few months after coming online, the PC was replaced with a Sun Sparc 10 [5] server running SunOS. Soon after that more machines started to come online including rm-rf.mysite.org (for the unix rm -rf command, to delete all files recursively), fdisk.mysite.org (to completely restructure a hard drive), pfy.mysite.org (pimply faced youth, the BOFH's faithful sidekick) and beancounter.mysite.org.

Today, Up At Six runs multiple machines in parallel on a telco grade infrastructure. The technical information is:

Technical Information on Servers/Location

  • Housed at bigbyte.cc [6] - a co-location provider in Albuquerque New Mexico
  • Multiple Dell PowerEdge 2850/2950
  • Single Sparc 20 (For historic reasons)
  • Raid 10 disks for speed and redundancy
  • Redundant failover servers monitored via Heartbeat
  • Telco-grade infrastructure provides customers the highest level of operational reliability with security, affordable bandwidths and fully redundant systems
  • Multiple fiber suppliers: Qwest, Worldcom and Time Warner Telecom
  • Redundant, Uninterrupted power, on common ground with surge protection
  • Dual incoming power feeds from two distinct PNM substations
  • Uninterrupted Power Supplies (UPS)
  • CAT/ONAN diesel generators with 8,000 gallon tank, under a 24-hour fuel contract

Quite a difference from a single PC on a single T1 connection...

--Damian 19:09, 8 May 2008 (MDT)

Retrieved from "http://wiki.upatsix.com/Up_At_Six"
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